Right from the off, I have to say that this is a superb little scanner. I wanted a small sheet fed scanner (but externally powered, i.e. no batteries) so that I could scan a set of spiral bound books I bought to make searchable PDF versions of them. Since these books amount to some 1500 pages, I wasn't going to do it with a traditional flat bed. And the fact that this scanner scans both the front and back of any pages at the same time is simply brilliant - and obviously saves you time.
The device connects via USB and has a very small external power supply. Setup on Windows 7 was as simple as installing the software from the CD and then connecting the device. The scanner itself is quite sturdy, and switches on when you lift the front cover up (which doubles as the feeder with a series of extending arms). It has a single blue button, which when pressed, starts scanning and fires up the ScanSnap Manager software - which sits in your system tray. I recommend configuring the manager software first - i.e. set the destination folder and filename (of which you can either choose a date/timestamp or an ever increasing number); set the compression, scan resolution and whether you want the images OCR'ed via the supplied AABBYY scanreader plugin to pdf, or written as a jpg.
The software feels quite dated, but lets you configure everything you need. I did have to tick the "Increase Contrast" as the text was looking a little grey - and I'll need to run the scans through Photoshop to further increase the contrast. It also seemed to ignore some of my settings until I restarted the scanner. I haven't tried the OCR capability yet so can't comment on it.
The scan quality looks very good, and there is zero bleedthrough on the double sided scans I'm making (the source paper feels like 90gsm). I wouldn't expect amazing results with photo's (even though the scanner does do colour scans up to 600dpi), however for documents it's perfect. For low res scans (150dpi) it is blisteringly fast; 8 or so seconds. For the higher resolutions (600dpi B&W) it takes around 25 seconds to scan both sides of a page.
As for the automatic sheetfeeder itself; it took me a little while to figure out the correct way to feed the paper to get the images coming out in the correct order with the datestamps (although it sometimes randomly rotates an image 180 degrees). I found that feeding the pages in ascending order but placing them upside down with the first side facing the table produced the correct file name order and image orientation. Now, the pages I'm scanning were removed from a spiral binder, so there's lots of those little rectangular punch holes which seem to catch on each other, so I've had to feed each sheet individually to prevent multiple pages being dragged through the scanner simultaneously. Once the first sheet has been taken, you can then drop the next sheet into place and it will continue to scan pages until you stop feeding it. I didn't find this a problem as I just got on with doing other things on my computer - you just need to remember to feed the next page in time. I tried the auto feeder, but because of the holes, it simply pulled a massive stack of pages through - on the plus side the scanner can handle pretty thick card stock (it has accepted 260gsm card stock with no problems at all). As with all auto-feeders, it really dependent on the quality and condition of the paper you are scanning - I tried it with a freshly laser printed document (approximately 20 double-sided pages) loaded into the feeder, and the scanner happily picked up each page separately; which is really impressive.
All in all, this scanner is worth every penny in terms of speed, reliability and time saved.
| Brand | Fujitsu |
|---|---|
| Product Dimensions | 11.18 x 3.9 x 3.03 cm; 1.4 Kilograms |
| Batteries | 1 Unknown batteries required. |
| Item model number | PA03643-B001 |
| Manufacturer | FUJITSU |
| Processor Count | 1 |
| Wattage | 9 watts |
| Are Batteries Included | No |
| Item Weight | 1.4 kg |
| Guaranteed software updates until | unknown |
